Most computer and consumer electronic devices require wires to record, play or exchange data. Ultra wideband (UWB) technology brings the convenience and mobility of wireless communications to high-speed interconnects in devices throughout the digital home and office. Designed for short-range, wireless personal area networks, ultra wideband is the leading technology for enabling high-speed wireless connection of multiple devices for transmission of video, audio and other high-bandwidth data. Ultra wideband, short-range radio technology, complements other frequency range radio technologies such as Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and cellular wide area communications. Ultra wideband technology relays data from a host device to other devices in the immediate area (e.g., up to 10 meters).
In general, an ultra wideband system is defined as any radio technology having a spectrum that occupies a bandwidth greater than 20 percent of the center frequency, or a bandwidth of at least 500 MHz. Therefore, the implementation of an ultra wideband system can be achieved by using a pulse-based technique or a multi-band orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based technique. In the pulsed ultra wideband system, pulses with an extremely short duration burst of radio frequency energy are transmitted and received. Specifically, each pulse is typically a few tens of picoseconds to a few nanoseconds in duration. These bursts represent from one to only a few cycles of a radio frequency carrier wave. As bandwidth is inversely related to pulse duration, the spectral extent of ultra wideband waveforms can be made quite large. In a multi-band OFDM system, the ultra wideband spectrum is divided into multiple sub-bands while information is transmitted through OFDM in different frequency sub-bands by using an inverse fast Fourier transfer (IFFT). Because of the wide bandwidth, the allowable transmission power in an ultra wideband system is very low thereby avoiding interference with other narrow band systems.
The ultra-wide bandwidth and low transmission power characteristics make ultra wideband technology attractive for high data rate, short range wireless communications, i.e., wireless personal area networks (WPAN). Currently, an ultra wideband transmitter transmits data at speeds between 100 megabits per second to 1 gigabit per second, which is significantly faster than the most common networking technologies now in use. For example, Wi-Fi communication transmits data at 54 megabits per second, and Bluetooth technology has a data transmission rate of only 1 megabit per second. The high data transmission speeds afforded by UWB technology may therefore be suitable for handling all the PC, consumer electronic (CE), Smartphone® (as manufactured by the Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash.), and Internet traffic for any home or business.